Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.